These are some of the top takeaways for Innovation Mission participants

For the last three days, more than a dozen media executives visited a variety of disruptive businesses in San Francisco/Silicon Valley as part of Local Media Association’s Innovation Mission.

As the tour wrapped up on Wednesday, participants gathered and shared their top takeaways.

Here they are:

We don’t embrace failure. It’s a deliberate organization. We can do rapid prototyping that doesn’t involve pushing code. We will start implementing this right away to show user need and desirability.

Stay true to your brand and give the customer what they want versus what we think is going to work well.

In the newspaper space, a big constraint is the focus on things that are systems-dependent. Let’s start asking “what are the innovations that can happen around those systems to impact them?”

I’m struggling to explain all the cool things we’re building at my company. I’m determined to work on how to present technology in a more useful way.

I came into this hoping to find out how to better understand our audiences and give them better experiences in order to monetize them better. There isn’t a silver bullet, but I’ll take with me a tool set and a pathway through research to hone this thinking.

I took a lot of inspiration from The Hustle visit. I love their focus on customer lifetime value (LTV). Our industry needs to focus much more on this!

“Voice is the new touch”

It’s striking the amount of time and attention that Google puts into hiring. It’s time my company put more things in place to make sure we hire the right people.